Crafting a Winning Book Proposal

In the fourth episode of Publish My Book, Avi breaks down the core components of a winning book proposal and identifies key questions you should be able to answer to effectively convey to your publisher why they should consider your manuscript. Avi shares why it is worth your time to introduce yourself to your target acquisitions editor in advance. He then takes a deep dive into the book proposal itself by addressing how you can craft each proposal section as strongly as possible. From the table of contents and proposal abstract to identifying which sample chapter to share and how to compile a succinct CV, Avi offers insider tips to help you set yourself up for success from the outset.

Related resources:

• How to Get a Contract from a Reputable Academic Publisher Before You Write Your Book
• Sample Book Proposal
• Watch Laura Portwood Stacer, author of The Book Proposal Book, in conversation with Avi Staiman about mastering the book proposal
• Hear from acquisitions editors: The Authors Handbook to Academic Book Publishing
• Identify your current stage within the publishing journey (and navigate the rest of the journey with success!)

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Publish My Book, your one-stop podcast for navigating the publishing journey from manuscript draft to published monograph. In each episode, we'll dive into a specific topic on the road to publishing your manuscript to offer you clarity, confidence, and an increased chance of publication success. I'm Avi Staiman, host of the Publish My Book podcast. Over the past 10 years, I've had the privilege of being the CEO of Academic Language Experts, a company dedicated to helping researchers and research institutions publish their high-quality humanities and social sciences research with respected academic publishers. During that time, I've worked with thousands of talented scholars from research universities and colleges to museums, foundations, and scholarly associations around the world, shepherding their research from ideation to publication. Now I've teamed up with the incredible team at the New Books Network to share everything I've learned about the journey with you, to help you streamline your process and transfer your idea into a book published by your dream publisher. Publish My Book, here we go!

In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to put together your proposal and what the different components of the proposal are. I want to give you a word of warning in advance - this topic will cover two episodes. In today's episode, we're going to go over the main components of our proposal. There is a document called a prospectus, and we're going to do a separate podcast episode about that momentarily. So be sure to pay attention and tune into both.

So, first of all, before we even get to the proposal, it's important to understand that you can start this process, the engagement with your publisher with your dream publisher, before you actually send off a proposal. I've seen many publishers recommend that you send an initial letter of interest where you briefly describe your project and what you're thinking of doing. Another way to do this is actually approach an acquisitions editor at a conference and tell them a little bit about who you are, your story, what your research is about, and if they'd potentially be interested. So that's a way to kind of get an early feeler for whether or not this book has legs, at least with this particular publisher.

Now you can send off a proposal without doing all these preliminary steps, although I always recommend keeping in mind that the relationship that you build with the acquisitions editor can be as important as your research itself. So, the first thing I would do before starting to go ahead and put together a proposal is actually check out your publisher that you want to publish with, check out their recommendations, their guidelines online for how they want to receive a proposal. I'm going to give you some generic general advice today which is based on what I've seen across many hundreds of publishers, but each particular publisher may have their own particular nuances or requirements.

The first thing I would say is to put together your table of contents. This should be something that's easy enough to do. Now, you may not have written your full manuscript yet, and your table of contents may change, and that's perfectly okay, so long as you are transparent and clear with your publisher and with your acquisitions editor that this is a work in progress. Right after you build out the table of contents, you should start working on the abstracts of every chapter. This gives the acquisitions editor a little bit more context and understanding of what the different sections and different parts of your book are going to be about. Don't go too in-depth. Don't write full pages on each chapter, one paragraph, two paragraphs on each chapter about what it's going to be about. Again, if it changes, that's okay. It likely will change. The acquisitions editor may ask you to make changes as it's an initial draft.

The next thing you're going to want to think about is a sample chapter, or maybe the introduction, or maybe both. Some publishers ask for one sample chapter, some publishers ask for two or three. It doesn't really matter. What's important is to think very carefully about which chapter it is you choose. And there are a few components to this. Number one is to make sure that your chapter can stand on its own. So what I mean by that is if you choose chapter 7 of your book and you need to have read chapters 1 through 6 in order to understand chapter 7 and the acquisition center doesn't have that, well then it's going to be hard for them to understand. What are your theories? What's your background? How did you get to this point? So make sure it stands on its own. In fact, you can make up a chapter that's not really going to be a chapter of your book. You can take little sections from different parts just to give them a taste of what your book is going to be about. The other thing I would recommend thinking carefully about is which one of your chapters is the most novel. Which one's going to be the aha for the acquisitions editor and for them to understand and appreciate the value of your work. Don't just send them the background literature about what everyone else has said about this topic previously. Think about what you bring to the table, what's new, what's novel, your most exciting results. You're trying to sell, you have one shot to make a good first impression, and make sure you do it. What you shouldn't do is just dump your entire thesis or your entire book on the plate of the acquisitions editor and expect them to read through it. There's a high chance that your proposal will be put to the bottom of the pile if the acquisitions editor needs to read 300 pages in order to understand what it is that you're doing.

Another thing that I'd highly recommend is a well-thought-out and well-written cover letter. When you're sending all of these materials and you're putting them all together, be sure to not forget to put together a cover letter that summarizes very quickly, very briefly who you are and what you're trying to do.

The next part of your proposal should be a what I call a narrative bio. You can send off a dry CV which has all of your publications and awards and grants and that's wonderful, but I think it actually misses the point. No one wants to read through a 50-page CV. What they may be interested in hearing, the acquisitions editors that is, is who are you? Why did you come to write this book? What's your story? What's your narrative? What led you to write this book? And why are you the perfect person for writing this book? Why couldn't someone else write it? And I think by sharing a little bit of personality, you'll come off a lot clearer and better than if you just send a dry CV.

The last component of a really good proposal is the prospectus, or sometimes it's just known as the proposal itself, which is a two to three-page document, which actually outlines the different ideas and parts of your book. And we will get to that in the next episode. So please continue and stay tuned.

Thanks for joining us on today's Publish My Book podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to some of the resources we mentioned and hit the subscribe button to get notifications every time we publish a new episode. Thanks to our partners at the New Books Network for helping us to produce this podcast. Thanks to our partners at the New Books Network for helping us to produce this podcast every day.